By Jeremy Gordin
Fatou Sankoh, wife of Sierra Leone vice-president and head of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) Foday Sankoh, said on Saturday night that her husband's arrest was unlawful and outrageous, especially in view of the fact that Sierra Leone's President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was telling the world that the Lome peace treaty was still valid.
Speaking from the United States, where she is trying to sort out arrangements connected with the RUF's website as well as purchasing uniforms for her husband's bodyguards, Sankoh said that she had warned her husband that the government was plotting against him.
"But he laughed at me and said that war was over in Sierra Leone. On the Sunday before my husband was shot, Johnny-Paul Koroma arrested all my husband's bodyguards. Yet my husband still believed that the government would honour its agreements."
Sankoh, an American citizen and a lawyer, said that as far as she knew, her 63-year-old husband was not being held by the British but had been turned over to the Sierre Leone government.
"And the reaction of the international community can only be described as appalling," she said. "There has not been one word said in his favour, only Human Rights Watch has called for him to have a free and fair trial. He is still vice-president."
Sankoh said that government claims that her husband had done illicit diamond deals with South African businessman Raymond Kramer were nonsense.
She said this claim was the kind of disinformation in which the Sierre Leone government seemed to specialise.
"They've also said that drugs were found in our house after it was looted. Those were drugs and medicines. In Africa, syringes are, as you know, sometimes used 10 times over and we needed to keep a supply for members in our house, which doubled as a storage depot."